Diminishing Returns

Two capitals got hit directly this weekend, and neither headline surprised me, which is itself the thing I want to sit with. Ukraine sent something like 450 drones at Moscow, Sobyanin calling it the “most massive” attack yet, hitting an oil refinery and a residential building. Hours later, Houthi ballistic missiles reached Riyadh, a fuel depot burning at the airport. Two wars that started at the margins, one over grain and shipping lanes and a captured Red Sea port, the other over refineries in border regions, and now both have crept all the way to the seat of power itself.

What’s odd is how unremarkable “most massive attack yet” has become as a phrase. This month alone I’ve read that the Ebola outbreak in Congo is now the deadliest on record, that August was the hottest month ever measured, that Nepal’s floods are among the worst the region has seen. Orwell worried about words getting hollowed out by euphemism, softened until they meant nothing. This is the opposite problem: a word like “largest” getting hollowed out by sheer repetition, used so often it stops registering as information and starts reading as a genre convention, the expected modifier before “attack” the way “breaking” precedes “news.”

Meanwhile Germany quietly held two state elections today that could end Merz’s chancellorship, no superlatives required, just the slow arithmetic of AfD support compounding since Saxony-Anhalt. That one I’ll actually watch. The loud records tend to resolve themselves into the next louder record. The quiet arithmetic is usually where the story actually goes.